1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a product information protecting method and a product information protecting system and, in particular, to a product information protecting method and product information protecting system that protect information about products purchased by a purchaser.
2. Related Art
In place of barcodes that identify the types of produce, wireless tags storing unique IDs are attached to some products to identify the types of the products or the individual products in these days. Using tags can offer significant benefits to both sellers and consumers of products. For example, sellers of products will be able to readily and reliably perform, or automate the management of the shipping products at factories, inventory, distribution, delivery, and management of products at distribution centers, and reception and inspection of incoming products and inventory at stores. On the other hand, benefits to consumers include proper sorting products into the proper categories when recycling, management of the history of repaired parts of cars, proper ordering-point management achieved by automated inventory and use-by-date management in refrigerators, washing program selection of washing machines with perfect consideration given to the material and durability of laundry, and prevention of harmful combinations of drugs or harmful concurrent uses of bleaches. In this way, the convenience of products can be significantly improved in their entire lifecycle, that is, in all stages from manufacturing to distribution to consumption to recycling of the products.
However, the use of wireless tags involves concerns about violations of privacy. This is because individual products can be easily identified and tracked by means of wireless tags and therefore the individual people who purchased and are taking along the products can be identified or located by identifying and tracking the products. These problems can be categorized into two: a first problem is that the owner of a product can be tracked by means of a unique identification (ID) of the product and a second problems is that the association between a wireless tagged product and its owner can be known by a third party. The unique ID held in the wireless tag attached to the product is not merely a number; but it can be used to search an appropriate database to retrieve attribute information about the product.
To solve the problems, a technique has been proposed that reduces the length of a tracking number, which is part of product information stored on a wireless tag called an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. However, the technique only reduces the length of tracking numbers identifying individual products and universal product codes which identify the product names are still stored in wireless tags. Therefore, the second problem described above is yet to be solved. Moreover, once product information stored on the wireless tag is reduced, it is difficult to restore the reduced portion of the information, which can be disadvantageous for reselling or recycling the products.
Thus, there is a need to provide a product information protecting system that protects information about products purchased by purchasers while allowing the information to be reused.